jPOD
By Douglas Coupland
Random House Canada, 517 pages, $34.95
jPod is a seriously funny book. In the past, Douglas Coupland's fictions (this is his 11th novel) have been intermittently hilarious, but jPod is a rolling thunder of sustained comedy, first page to last, as it sends up and skewers the shamelessness and amorality that define our era. Mordecai Richler employed a sharp satirist's scalpel in Cocksure to dissect corporate boneheads, greed-driven marketers and sexual wastrels in the conglomerate-fuelled, celebrity-driven publishing and movie-making worlds of the Swinging Sixties. In much the same way, Coupland targets the ever more vacuous and vicious people who control and market the computer games that are redefining the faces and formulae of mass entertainment in the first decade of the new millennium. As with Generation X (1991) and Microserfs (1995), Coupland's timing is impeccable: jPod is the right book at the right time, an early warning of what lies beyond the bend of the dead man's economic curve we're currently riding.
Ethan Jarlewski and his five co-workers (whose first or last names all begin with a J) are "jPod," a team of software geeks working on an innovative game for a massive Vancouver video-design company. When Steve, the new head of marketing, insists that Ethan and his crew "retroactively insert a charismatic cuddly turtle character into our skateboard game, which is already nearly one-third of the way through its production cycle," a classic situation is set up. The rules of marketing must be obeyed in defiance of logic and consumer taste, because Steve "took Toblerone chocolate and turned it around inside of two years."
The question is: Can Ethan's ill-assorted coterie of dysfunctional underdogs find enough focus to rise up and bite the hands that feed them by turning that turtle into something far more dangerously reptilian? (This turtle and much else of interest can be viewed on-line at www.jpod.info.) The author has described his protagonist as "non-Doug," and Ethan is distinctly different from any of Coupland's previous narrators. Ethan is very, very smart, a lot of fun and utterly convincing in his capacity to see himself as behaving normally while everyone around him is "going random." As he says, "I look at most people like recently lit Roman candles, unsure if they're about to go off, or if they're merely duds."
Until Steve's arrival, Ethan's greatest workplace challenge was "to have a job without actually doing work, which is relatively hard to pull off in a company where workspace productivity is measured with just about every conceivable form of metrics." His principal coping mechanism is to distract his co-workers from their jobs by issuing truly inspiring techno-challenges of his own.
Ethan is very much like Coupland in his deep and abiding fascination with mass culture for its abundance of images, and simply revels in its powers of replication. Among a host of other delights in a visually astonishing book, jPod contains printouts (with intentional errors embedded) of pi to a 100,000 digits, the 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000 and the 972 three-letter words permitted in Scrabble because Evil Mark Jackson, a co-member of the pod, wants to out-Ethan Ethan and out-source Steve.
Away from work, Ethan's life is fused to his Boomer parents' "in the gloomy evergreen cocoon of the British Properties." His Mom runs a marijuana grow-op with a built-in death trap in her basement (that ever so accidentally electrocutes a larcenous and libidinous biker). Dad has given up marine engineering to get into "acting, mostly TV ..... copping ..... tiny crappy, non-speaking parts in TV commercials where he always seems to be left on the cutting-room floor, as well as gigs as an extra in crowd scenes." Dad does it because it gives him the opportunity to be photographed shaking hands "with a galaxy of made-in-Vancouver actors carted up to Canada to max out tax credits" and to philander with young and nubile stagehands.
Ethan's brother Greg, who is a realtor in "West Van's bizarre Canterbury neighbourhood, a rain forest bulldozed to make way for jumbo houses that resembled microwave ovens covered with cedar shake roofing," inhabited by "mostly sports stars and abandoned Asian housewives sitting out their three-year sentences required for citizenship" adds to the fireworks-in-the-offing, while Kam Fong, a Chinese client, becomes criminally involved in everybody's businesses and pleasures.
As plot and subplots twist and turn around Vancouver and over to China and back, Coupland writes wittily and wisely in a non-doctrinaire, anti-ideological way about a lot of big issues — globalization, multiculturalism, fast food, genetic modifications, drugs, people smuggling, intellectual piracy, slave wages, Chinese factories — and smaller ones — spam, lesbian jargon, secret ingredients in soft drinks and, first and foremost, computer games.
He also writes himself into the story as a character named Douglas Coupland, who is described in extremely unflattering terms, but who is the one who grasps what everyone else in jPod fails to see: namely, "Nobody gets rich on software in the twenty-first century. The only money remaining is in hardware, and only hardware made offshore at that, preferably in some unregulated, uninvestigated Asian backwater where you can get a day's labour and a hand job for the cost of a bag of Skittles." It's an insight that turns Ethan, the book and readers inside out.
When Richler's Cocksure was published in 1968, the Canadian literary establishment, as represented by such reviewers as Marian Engel and George Woodcock, were prissy toward it: Engel admitted freely that she wasn't quite sure what it was satirizing, but did know that it was "smart-alecky stuff" that didn't "cut any deeper than the Sunday-paper set it's aimed at." Woodcock wrote it off as the "sexual fantasy and bawdy jokes that beguile adolescent boys." Although Richler won the Governor-General's Award that year, it took much longer for him to achieve literary respectability in this country than people nowadays generally acknowledge. That seems to be the fate of Canadian writers who have highly receptive cultural antennae and are brazen enough to exploit them.
That said (and Coupland can expect attacks from academics for his jokes at gender-driven jargon), a more legitimate reason for Coupland's outsider status is the reckless extravagance that has fuelled his prodigious output. As a writer, he's not always given his readers enough breathing space to get to know his characters on their own terms and learn to love them as he does. This time, he establishes sufficient distance between himself and his creations through "non-Doug" Ethan's narrative that readers find themselves sliding inside alien shoes that end up fitting remarkably well. jPod is an audacious satire from a superb comedian who, as Ethan says, is "the kind of prick [who] would end a book just when everything's going so well."
Contributing reviewer T.F. Rigelhof is the author of This is Our Writing, among other works.
